Three Wise Men

December 28, 2012

We have a simple Christmas puzzle today:

Three wise men named Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar went to Macy’s Department Store on 34th Street to buy gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. When they took their gifts to the cashier, she multiplied the prices of the items and found a total price of $65.52, but the wise men noticed that she multiplied the numbers and asked her to compute the total price again, but this time using addition instead of multiplication. When she did, the cashier found that the total was exactly the same. What were the individual prices of the three gifts?

Your task is to solve the puzzle and find the three prices. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.